This guy didn't care about his location data going to google either: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...
He got screwed over big time. Thousands of dollars, just to avoid a jail cell.
There are uses of personal data that can be harmless, but once that data is in the hands of someone else you don't have any say in how it is used (harmless or otherwise) and even if the people using your data today aren't doing anything abusive with it, that data will live forever and you never know who will end up with it in the future or what they will do with it.
If the alternative is a subscription (assuming that actually means your data is not handed over to someone else) then at least you'll know what the cost of a product/service is, and you'll only pay for it while you're subscribed.
If you pay with your data, once it's out of your hands it can be used against you again and again at any time so you never get to stop "paying" and can never know what it will ultimately cost you.
As another example of getting screwed over, I've got a family member who bought a bluray of some movie in a shop, and then when she got home to play it found that her player refused because of DRM. The player wasn't connected to the internet and it needed to connect to a remote server in order to get permission to play her legally purchased media on her legally purchased player. She didn't understand what was happening and called me. The player didn't have wifi. The company sold a special USB wifi adapter at an insane price, otherwise she'd either have to move her furniture to take the player upstairs next to her modem and connect it physically, or run a very very long cable across her entire house.
The next time she needed a bluray player, she avoided the old brand, but didn't even check to see if it had wifi capability before buying (she got lucky and it did).